Fuzzyman just posted yesterday about TIOBE’s index of top programming languages. It’s interesting, but not particularly meaningful, that Python and C# have swapped places since last year, putting Python in slot 7 and C# in slot 8. What’s interesting about this? It implies that Python is in the realm of being commercially competitive. This is a good statistic to provide to dynamic-language-leary bosses when that next project rolls around. What’s not particularly meaningful about this? It doesn’t mean anything, really, in regard to Python’s usefulness compared to C#. Nor does it mean that Python is really being used more than C#. Python had a 3.144% and C# had a 2.992%. I’d say that statistical wiggle room outweighs the 0.152% variance between these two numbers. At best, I’d put all these statistics in the category of “rough guess” even though they have hard evidencial “proof”. Regardless, it’s encouraging how hight up in the list Python is. And it was amusing that Python bumped C#.
On the other hand, (Visual) Basic swapped places with Perl. Ugh.
Even though python has gone up in 1 year, it's only gone up 0.11 %. Maybe Perl was just being generous with it's percentages :)
I just found this post today (March 2007). I see Python is still slightly ahead and that both languages have grown with Python at 3.897% and C# at 3.365%. Also interesting--and not noted above--Microsoft fully sponsors the IronPython project: a version of Python for .NET with better performance.